One knowledgeable in the history of baseball undoubtedly will be aware of numerous attempts to improve the hitting characteristics of wooden baseball bats. Some inventions have attempted to provide bats with very hard barrel portions that are intended to hit a ball harder and thus further. Others, with the stated goals of increasing the usable lifetime of the bat while reducing danger to players and fins, have sought to create a bat that resists splintering upon impact with a baseball. Still other inventors have created bats that deaden the impact energy between a bat and a struck ball thereby allowing easier and more effective bunting by a batter. Yet further attempted improvements surely are known to one skilled in the art.
One can reasonably infer from these continuing efforts to improve on baseball bats that certain needs in the art remain unmet. For example, there undoubtedly remains a need for a ball bat that provides an exceedingly hard striking surface for enabling a player to hit a ball harder and further than prior art bats. As many prior art disclosures have recognized, however, there is also a need for a bat that presents such a hard striking surface without being unacceptably heavy and thus unwieldy. Still further, the sport would be most advantageously served by a bat that simultaneously presents these advantages without being unduly vulnerable to splintering. As of yet, it appears, each attempted improvement in baseball bats has addressed one and possibly two of these goals to a limited extent. However, it does not seem that any ball bat has addressed each of the aforementioned concerns simultaneously in an effective manner.
One such as the present inventor who is considering these problems and attempted solutions of the prior art would do well to notice by way of background that the attempts of human inventors to improve wooden baseball bats are supplemented by nature's less controllable effects on the actual material used to forge the bats. Those who have played quite a bit of baseball with wooden bats will be aware that bats will, from time to time, fortuitously have a naturally-occuring knot coincident with the surface of the barrel portion of the bat. Such knots comprise hard, cross-grained masses of wood that are formed where a branch joins a tree trunk. As such, the knots present an area on the surface of the wooden bat that is far harder than the surrounding wood of the bat that does not have a knot therein.
Many have realized that wooden ball bats from time to time have sweet spots or hot spots. These spots commonly are discovered when a player hits a baseball with a certain portion of the surface area of the bat and the ball tends to be hit harder and, potentially, further. Prior to the present invention, however, it does not appear that persons have realized that these sweet spots or hot spots are in fact created by the fortuitous natural occurrence of a knot or a very hard spot in that portion of the bat.
In light of the foregoing, it becomes apparent that a ball bat presenting a viable solution to at least one of the problems that the prior art has attempted to address would be useful. It is clearer still that a ball bat that simultaneously addresses each of the above-described concerns while exploiting the effects of locating a very hard spot on the barrel of the bat and thereby providing a number of heretofore-unrealized advantages would truly represent a marked advance in the art.